Replication materials for "Bicameralism Hinges on Legislative Professionalism"

Variables with names surrounded by underscores (e.g. "__XT__") contain no data and are only for organizing the variable list. Data span 2009 through 2018. Exclusions are detailed in the article.


__XT__				Variables dealing with state and year

state				Two-letter state postal code

statename			Full name of state

fips				State FIPS code

year				Year of legislative session

stateyear			state+year, e.g. "CA11", handy for scatterplots



__BILLS_ALL__   	Variables dealing with the number of bills passed per state-year and their disposition

n_statutes      	Number of statutory bills that passed chamber of origin, coded as described in article's supplement

lnstatutes      	ln( n_statutes + 1 )

pct_intropassed2	Of bills that passed 1st chamber and were introduced in 2nd chamber, percent that passed 2nd. See article supplement.

pct_hb_intropassed2	Same, but only for bills that originated in the lower chamber

pct_sb_intropassed2	Same, but only for bills that originated in the upper chamber



__EXPENDITURES__	Variables related to our alternative measure of professionalism (expenditures per legislator)

totalexp2019    	Total legislative expenses, from Census Bureau's Annual Survey of State Government Finances, collapsed into biennia, and converted to $1000s of 2019 dollars using Consumer Price Index

expendall			totalexp2019 / number of legislators in state

lnexpendall     	ln( expendall + 1 )

expendperlog    	totalexp2019 / ln( number of legislators in state + 1 )

termlimits      	Dichotomous indicator for the presence of legislative term limits in a state, from NCSL



__BOWEN_GREEN__		Professionalism indicators from Bowen and Greene's "Legislative Professionalism Component Scores, 1973-2014" (actually a draft update provided to us by Bowen)

t_slength 			Session length (regular and special sessions) in legislative days

slength				Session length (regular sessions only) in legislative days

lnsession			ln( t_slength + 1 )

salary_real			Biennial legislator salary, in thousands of 2019 dollars

lnsalary			ln( salary_real + 1 )

expend				Legislative expenditures per legislator, in thousands of 2019 dollars

lnexpend			ln( expend + 1 )

mds1				Multidimensional scaling (MDS) predicted value, first dimension

mds2				Multidimensional scaling (MDS) predicted value, second dimension



__IDEOLOGY__		Variables calculated from legislative common space ideology scores, Shor and McCarty, "State Legislative Aggregate Ideology Data July 2020 Update"

chamber_distance	abs( sen_chamber - hou_chamber ), ie absolute value of distance between chamber medians

chamber_split		Dichotomous indicator that different parties control each chamber, calculated from relevant variables in Shor/McCarty



__OTHER__
joint				Number of joint committees in a state-biennium, from Table 3.23 in various editions of Book of the States from Council of State Governments. (Our data is collapsed to biennia; when BoS occasionally misses this variable for one year, we interpolate using data from the other year of the state's biennium.)

makse				Makse's bicameral distinctiveness score for each state-biennium, see Replication Data for "Bicameral Distinctiveness in American State Legislatures"

limit_either		Dichotomous indicator that at least one chamber in the state has a bill introduction limit. Sourced and measured as described in article supplement.

governor_split		Dichotomous indicator coded 1 if one party controls both chambers of legislature but not the governorship

